I see these kinds of hateful comments repeated on HN all the time, and these comments disgust me. Why phrase the criticism in such an incendiary way? What’s the goal here?
> The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt
> They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt
How would you phrase this? Thinking programmers are too stupid to understand languages with modern features is just the plain literal meaning of the quote, no?
He spent decades at Bell Labs. He was also, IIRC, in his seventies.
So a more charitable interpretation would be that most of his colleagues are in their 20s and just out of school with a CS degree. He doesn't think they can (productively) use the languages the cutting-edge PL researchers generate.
> They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school
these same lowly colleagues were also incapable of wiping their asses at one point in their life but over the years and skidmarks, they all mastered that beautiful language and now make heated bidet money.
I think Rob Pike didn't mean brilliant as a complete compliment here. It was more an indictment on astronaut engineering of languages rather then engineers. He is literally the designer of Go and likes to program in it.